As soon as he graduated from high school, he moved away to the East Coast for college and then almost never stopped moving for the rest of his life. As a young man, he traveled to Europe on a cattle boat, tried to get a job working on the Panama canal, lived on a socialist commune, and traveled all over the United States working as a journalist.
He published short stories in popular magazines and produced five novels, none of which got any attention. He said, "I lacked sense enough to see that, after five failures, I was foolish to continue writing." He took a trip back home to Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and while he was there, he felt as though everyone was judging him and gossiping about him. The experience gave him the idea for a novel about a rebellious woman named Carol Kennicott who moves to a small town called Gopher Prairie and tries to bring it culturally up to date, only to fail miserably. That novel was Main Street (1920), and it was a literary sensation. No one had ever written such a fierce attack on small town American life. It was published at a time when Americans were moving in huge numbers from small towns to big cities, and it captured the way most young Americans felt about the small towns they'd grown up in.
Lewis described the people in his fictional Gopher Prairie as "A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world."
The town of Sauk Centre, which Lewis hated so much when he was growing up, now holds a festival every summer called Sinclair Lewis Days. The town also has a museum called the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center, and a street called Sinclair Lewis Avenue.
